Martin Pjecha’s book Theo-politics of the Hussite movement: from reform to revolution seeks to overturn an accepted understanding of how the Hussite reform turned towards violence and radicalism, which resulted in an establishment of a radical commune at Tabor. The standard narrative explains Tabor as a place where Hussite reform ideals effectively disintegrated, but Pjecha argues against this view. He insists that we ought not to see the commune as an aberration but rather as a perfectly logical outcome of the intellectual pedigree of the reform’s leaders. Over the course of the book’s four complex chapters, the author discusses the influence of Christian Platonism on the political thinking and activities of Hussite leaders, seeking to show how those leaders appropriated it and how it shaped their worldview, as well as the actions of their followers.

The book’s central claim is that church reformers in fifteenth-century Bohemia appropriated the Christian Platonism of St Augustine of Hippo. Pjecha opens chapter i with a historical overview, underscoring the continuities between what would become Hus’s agenda and the agenda of reform-minded preachers who preceded him. Pjecha shows that, when Wyclif’s thought arrived in Bohemia, there was already a rich substrate of reformist thinking in which it flourished, including strains of Augustinianism. But a significant reworking of them would take place. Most relevant here is the shift in opinion regarding the attainability of divine order on earth. Whereas Augustine was deeply pessimistic about any attempt to improve the human situation in this world, the reformers led by Matthew of Janov were optimistic about the possibility of religious and even socio-political improvement. In fact, they thought such an improvement not only possible in theory but also achievable in practice (by them). Moreover, the reformers insisted that God’s will was accessible (to them), which then dictated their actions aimed at crippling the authority of the institutional Church. Pjecha argues that these positions were mere ‘innovations upon the Augustinian tradition’ (p. 32), but to me they seem more like ruptures. It is no wonder that the Church considered Augustine to be a saint while some of his Hussite interpreters were deemed heretical.

In chapter ii, Pjecha considers the enemies of reform, identifying them with the Church’s visible hierarchy. Using the writings of Jan Hus and Jakoubek of Stříbro, he describes the visible Church as the ‘immanent community of Antichrist, a theo-political order that kept humankind in a state of corruption and ignorance’ (p. 84). This order was so rotten and so extensive that it must be entirely uprooted and replaced with a ‘uniform theo-political order founded in divine law alone’ (p. 84). Pjecha argues that this position represents a further reworking of Augustine’s Platonic vision. The only difference is where one looks for a model of the ideal human condition. Augustine did not think it could be realised in earthly life, but the reformers disagreed. They looked to the primitive Church, which to them was the ideal human condition of ‘spiritual and political coordination according to the divine norm which governs the cosmos’ (p. 85). This gave them determination to bring that kind of spiritual and political harmony into existence again.

Chapter iii sees the implementation of the chalice as emblematic of the Hussite reform vision. Pjecha considers the events after the death of Jan Hus, underscoring the ways in which the reform movement diffused over larger territory, which, in turn, lessened the influence of the Hussite central authority in Prague. Around the same time, the council in Constance condemned Hus and the movement that took his name, and the stakes of adherence grew. Pjecha argues that, in this context, the chalice represented much more than merely a sacramental practice. Whereas Rome insisted that reserving the chalice for the clergy was a divinely guided improvement, the reformers saw that practice as a departure from the primitive Church, a departure that revealed the corruption of the Church’s authority. However, some of Pjecha’s claims about the nature of the Utraquist celebration seem exaggerated, most notably when he claims that the Hussite celebration ‘must have dissolved a central, visible sign distinguishing clergy from laity’ and ‘involved active participation from all the classes of men and women’ (p. 135). While there are records of Utraquist Masses celebrated out in the countryside in which priests refused to wear priestly vestments, even such liturgies hardly obliterated distinctions between clergy and laity. But to Pjecha the chalice ‘already now accomplishes to a significant degree the Platonic goal of reditus, the separation of humans from creaturely individuals and their reunification into primordial divine unity’ (p. 157). However, this estimation of the chalice’s importance goes too far. Rome did not share Pjecha’s view either, because in 1436 it accepted communion under both kinds as an acceptable liturgical practice. Pjecha argues that, by doing so, the Roman Church ‘accept[ed] the relativity of its universal claims of authority’ (p. 201). But the Roman Church would hardly accept any such thing. Rather, their decision showed that, to them, the chalice represented an acceptable alternative practice and not a cosmically different view of the essence of Christian orthodoxy and identity, as the author argues.

Chapter iv explores the commune at Tabor and its shift to violent rebellion. This needs some explaining, and it is Pjecha’s stated goal to bring a new understanding of Tabor’s move from apolitical attitude to a course of action that advocated the creation of a new political order. When the prophesied Second Coming did not, in fact, take place, Pjecha explains, ‘Taborite leaders shifted from prophets of divine transformation to preachers of self-redemptive revolution’ (p. 237). In this revolution, the laity were told to ‘align human rage with divine rage’ (p. 246), help establish ‘the theocratic principles of the future age’ and help bring down the ‘remedial institutions of the old world’ in order to bring ‘the future order in the present’ (p. 243). Pjecha insists that the violence that resulted cannot easily be explained as a function of the commune’s apocalyptic and chiliastic expectations (as often done by scholars), because such sentiments are usually ‘consolatory rather than hortatory’ (p. 248). Instead, we must consult the reformers’ reworking of Augustine to explain the phenomenon satisfactorily. Pjecha claims to have highlighted the ‘intellectual hurdles that actually stood in the way of any medieval formation of revolutionary thought’ (p. 247). Perhaps he has. But violence is not always a rational act; moreover, it was perpetrated by men and women who knew little about Matthew of Janov’s reinterpretation of Augustine. Nevertheless, Pjecha concludes his book by claiming that ‘themes of ethical agency, individualist voluntarism, activist fidelity, and confident anthropology were all of fundamental relevance to make popular revolution conceivable’ (p. 248).

Pjecha’s study is a very difficult book that makes some very difficult assumptions (some of them highlighted above) in the process of arriving at its destination. Although it revolves around intellectual appropriation, it does not always make clear how Hussite thinkers were supposed to have encountered some of the ideas under discussion: for example, the putative link between Dionysius Areopagita and Matthew of Janov is never clarified. In addition, the book considers only learned Latin treatises (excepting a few sermons) but assumes widespread popular circulation of them. It also assumes that radicalised Taborites perpetrated violence and destruction for deliberate and intellectually discernible reasons. In conclusion, the book seeks to show that Christian Platonism and mysticism were fundamental to the Hussite reform movement, but what I am left wondering is how they influenced anyone’s behaviour and whether the ideas we are left with after the reformers ‘appropriated’ them are still recognisably Augustinian or Platonic at all.